In 1981 Chaim Potok published a novel about Japan called The Book of Lights based on his experience of living in Japan as a chaplain in the U.S. army after the Korean War. Potok had been raised as a traditional observant Jew and was later ordained as a Rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Naturally his worldview stemmed from the traditions with which he was most familiar and in this sense his outlook was rather parochial. His time in Japan shook him up and surprised him with the revelation that such a remarkable civilization had stemmed from roots other than his own. This discovery created for him not exactly a crisis of faith but an arousal, a questioning about where the goodness of civilization comes from. Potok felt that God dwelt in Japan but wondered whether it was his God, another God or just a godly presence that can be felt in any true civilization.
The difference is that Japan … is not being pushed by its elites to replace and even enlarge its population through an open-borders policy.
After my recent visit to Japan, I think that I had a similar revelation. Although my own Jewish upbringing was not nearly as formal as his, and though during my twenties I had become a rather secular Jew, over the years for reasons that I do not completely understand I came to appreciate the goodness that had flowed in making Western civilization from the Jewish tradition. (READ MORE from Max Dublin: A Passover in Japan)
As I have written earlier, my early contact with Japanese culture was through its end products, its literature, art, cuisine, and tools. When in Japan I experienced the living civilization which had produced these marvelous artifacts and I was duly impressed. My sense of the possibilities of what the good life can look like expanded. I have always felt that there are many paths to God and while immersed in this culture it was inescapable to me that this was one of them. There is a Hebrew expression that encompasses this feeling, Zeh gam tov — this is also good.
I have been told that that for the most part the Japanese are not religious but I’m not sure that I believe this, or, to be precise, exactly what this means. The dominant recognizable religion in Japan is Shintoism. Part of the Jewish tradition is living a rules-based orderly life and one can find these rules in the Hebrew Bible, especially in Leviticus. But one does not need a set of written rules, many of which are rather esoteric, in order to live a good life. Unwritten rules will do just as well.
The heart of Shintoism has to do with living in harmony with one’s earthly cohabitants while cleanliness is also a leitmotif. There is no institutionalized religion in Japan like the dying institutionalized religion in the West but rather the values of Shintoism seem to have been internalized in the culture, these are the waters that the areligious Japanese swim in. And though there are no religious services such as we know them in the West there is some ritual, some prayers, although only of the petitionary kind. A person approaches a shrine within a temple, bangs a gong or rings a bell to awaken the god or get its attention, kneels, bows, and makes a wish, asks a special favor. And bear in mind that in the West, Jews, including Orthodox Jews, do not necessarily believe in God — I once read about a survey that found fully one-third of Orthodox Jews are not believers but they still practice their religion which exhorts them in so many ways to become disciplined and better people. Even in Israel, a highly secularized country, most Jews celebrate the holidays, keep kosher, and everyone seems to be always rushing around to help, to do mitzvot, good deeds. In this sense there is a common core of values between Jewish and Japanese civilization. It is interesting that Abraham Setsuzu Kotsuji, a former Shinto priest who wrote From Tokyo to Jerusalem, converted to Judaism due to the influence of reading the Book of Leviticus.
To me the most endearing thing about Japanese culture is that it is both backward and forward looking at the same time. The Japanese revere their traditions and you can see this in full display in the street. There are shops in all of the major cities that rent out kimonos and a Japanese couple out on the town will often rent them and wear them all day to enhance their experience. You see them unselfconsciously strolling down the street and popping into shops and restaurants and it’s not like a costume party and no one gives them a second glance except for people like me who admire how beautiful they look. On the other hand, they seamlessly incorporate all manner of high tech into their daily life, though they do not seem to be obsessively glued to their smartphones as do many Westerners.
One of the most delightful experiences for me was visiting a pottery village in Kyoto. Every large Japanese city has a sizable cluster of pottery studios that produce and sell all manner of crockery and the variety of the products that are produced there is astonishing, I’ve seen nothing nearly close to it at any similar Western venue. At one of these studios a master potter gave a free demonstration. He was 95 years old and perfectly sound of hand and eye, and whipped off one type of vessel after the other — sake pitchers, teapots, teacups and so forth. After a piece was finished, he would cut it down the middle with a piece of wire to show the viewers the cross section and then carelessly bunch the thing up and toss it in a pail for future reference. He then showed us the glazing and firing facilities and made a point of telling us that the glaze that he used was a secret recipe which even at his venerable age he was not quite ready to pass on to the next generation. Trade secrets are an old tradition in the making of crafts and I cannot say whether they always really add a certain je ne sais quoi to the final product but they certainly do add cache. (READ MORE: A Very Unhappy Anniversary)
Western pundits sometimes remark that Japan with an aging population and a low birth-rate is a dying civilization. In point of fact, it is no more aging and has no smaller a birth-rate than some European countries. The difference is that Japan, which does allow for some immigration mainly from east Asian countries, is not being pushed by its elites to replace and even enlarge its population through an open-borders policy. The most important thing is that it is maintaining its quality of life through orderly immigration policies. This is not xenophobia; it is simply self-preservation. Demographers claim that a low birth-rate eventually leads to extinction. But does anyone really believe that Japan is on a trajectory to merely poofing out? I for one certainly do not. In a famous lecture which pertained mainly to American foreign policy, Charles Krauthammer maintained that decline is an option rather than an inevitability. By all appearances Japan has chosen to flourish rather than to decline.
